Berlin film festival

The netherworld

THE magic realism that runs through the fiction of so many avant-garde novelists beguiles film makers too. Not, however, Walter Salles, the Brazilian director whose low-budget “Central do Brasil” carried off the Golden Bear award at the Berlin film festival this week. His prize-winning film is a beautifully shot, realistic story of an abandoned boy searching for his father and is notable for the fine acting of Fernanda Montenegro and Vinicius de Oliveira.

But many of the other 300-odd films on show at the festival were more mystical. So was the event's poster. Its androgynous male-female head seemed to promise explorations of the netherworld between reality and illusion, where things are seldom what they seem.

Such deception was carried to extremes in a Spanish film that bemused festival-goers: “Abre los ojos” (Open your eyes), directed by Alejandro Amenabar. In it a young Madrileño is disfigured in an accident engineered by a jealous girlfriend to kill her rival. He awakens each morning to face what is possibly virtual reality in cyberspace, and can never be sure which girl he will be seeing that day. Mr Amenabar's references to Alfred Hitchcock's “Vertigo” add to the confusion. So do publicity posters that make the young man resemble the young Ingrid Bergman.

Myth versus reality is the theme of another film about tortured romance that excited film buffs at the festival. Yossi Somer's “The Dybbuk of the Holy Apple Field” is an Israeli-Swiss production based on a Yiddish play by S. Anski that inspired a memorable film that was shot in Poland in the 1930s. In the new film the gothic chiaroscuro of the shtetl is replaced by the muted colours of the Orthodox section of today's Jerusalem. The hero listens to a Walkman but the plot is ageless: the soul of a young man who loved but could not marry must be exorcised from his surviving sweetheart.

More prosaically, illusion is manufactured to serve political ends in Barry Levinson's uncannily prescient “Wag the Dog”, which won the special jury prize at the festival. Its story involves Hollywood advisers using computer imaging to stage a virtual war in the Balkans and so divert the American public's attention from the scandal of the president fondling a teenage girl in the Oval Office.

Other, more mundane, variations of illusion cropped up in Berlin in “Good Will Hunting”, a film directed by Gus Van Sant in which a janitor is revealed to be a mathematics genius, and Nick Hurran's “Girls' Night”, the story of two English bingo winners enjoying a spree in Las Vegas while one of them is dying of cancer.

A more surprising feature of the festival was the startling number of musicals from European countries. The amateur silliness of “Tano da morire” (“To Die for Tano”), a low-budget musicial with a Mafia plot from Italy, was especially tiresome. Alain Resnais's “On connaît la chanson” (The song's familiar) was more professional but not altogether successful. Characters involved in a humorously complicated set of relationships suddenly break into snippets from French songs of the past 70 years. The songs are reminiscent of Dennis Potter's, but lack his ironic bite. “Jeanne et le garçon formidable”, directed by Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau, was even less effective. AIDS is the unlikely subject of its plot, and its songs lack both musical and choreographic interest.

These effforts caused many in Berlin to sigh for the French musicals of the 1960s. For instance, “Les parapluies de Cherbourg” (“The Umbrellas of Cherbourg”), starring the irresistible Catherine Deneuve, who during the festival, which included a retrospective screening of 13 of her most memorable films, accepted a Golden Bear for her lifetime achievement in the cinema.